Re: Woody on 486 problem

On 20.02.07 23:40, Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:52:24 -0600
John Hasler <jhasler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Arnt Karlsen writes:
..write new bios code for old 386 irons to use todays new big ass
disks is trivial to you?

Linux doesn't use the BIOS. You just need something the BIOS
supports for a boot disk. Once the kernel is up it will handle your
large disk fine.

Does that mean that I can put /boot on a CD, boot from it and have the
root on a HDD bigger then 32 GB?

Yes. But in some cases (of motherboards) you'll have to turn off that disk
in the BIOS setup.

My BIOS does not recognize HDDs bigger then 32 GB unless I set the jumpers
on the 'clip' setting, but it can boot from CD.

2.4 kernels had CONFIG_IDEDISK_STROKE optikon for geometry resizing of big
disks. It seems that 2.6 kernel does that automatically (or at least, using
option hdx=stroke). You could even try to boot from the disk and have /boot
there, just make BIOS think it's smaller disk than it is...

However I don't think you should have root partition bigger than 32GB - my
root partitions are usually smaller - I use /var, /home (ext3) and /tmp
(tmpfs) on extra filesystems.
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